Media Ecology — An Overview

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In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 7) Thus begins the classic work of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, in which he introduced the world to his enigmatic paradox, “The medium is the message.” But what does it mean? How can the medium be its own message?

Of all the Internet searches that end up at the McLuhan Program website and weblog, the search for the meaning of the famous “McLuhan Equation” is the most frequent. Many people presume the conventional meaning for “medium” that refers to the mass-media of communications – radio, television, the press, the Internet. And most apply our conventional understanding of “message” as content or information. Putting the two together allows people to jump to the mistaken conclusion that, somehow, the channel supersedes the content in importance, or that McLuhan was saying that the information content should be ignored as inconsequential. Often people will triumphantly hail that the medium is “no longer the message,” or flip it around to proclaim that the “message is the medium,” or some other such nonsense. McLuhan meant what he said; unfortunately, his meaning is not at all obvious, and that is where we begin our journey to understanding.

Marshall McLuhan was concerned with the observation that we tend to focus on the obvious. In doing so, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. Whenever we create a new innovation – be it an invention or a new idea – many of its properties are fairly obvious to us. We generally know what it will nominally do, or at least what it is intended to do, and what it might replace. We often know what its advantages and disadvantages might be. But it is also often the case that, after a long period of time and experience with the new innovation, we look backward and realize that there were some effects of which we were entirely unaware at the outset. We sometimes call these effects “unintended consequences,” although “unanticipated consequences” might
be a more accurate description. Many of the unanticipated consequences stem from the fact that there are conditions in our society and culture that we just don’t take into consideration in our planning. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions. All of these dynamic processes that are entirely non-obvious comprise our ground or context. They all work silently to influence the way in which we interact with one another, and with our society at large. In a word (or four), ground comprises everything we don’t notice.

If one thinks about it, there are far more dynamic processes occurring in the ground than comprise the actions of the figures, or things that we do notice. But when something changes, it often becomes noticeable. And noticing change is the key.

McLuhan tells us that a “message” is, “the change of scale or pace or pattern” that a new invention or innovation “introduces into human affairs.” (McLuhan 8) Note that it is not the content or use of the innovation, but the change in inter-personal dynamics that the innovation brings with it. Thus, the message of theatrical production is not the musical or the play being produced, but perhaps the change in tourism that the production may encourage. In the case of a specific theatrical production, its message may be a change in attitude or action on the part of the audience that results from the medium of the play itself, which is quite distinct from the medium of theatrical production in general. Similarly, the message of a newscast are not the news stories themselves, but a change in the public attitude towards crime, or the creation of a climate of fear. A McLuhan message always tells us to look beyond the obvious and seek the nonobvious changes or effects that are enabled, enhanced, accelerated or extended by the new thing.

McLuhan defines medium for us as well. Right at the beginning of Understanding Media, he tells us that a medium is “any extension of ourselves.” Classically, he suggests that a hammer extends our arm and that the wheel extends our legs and feet. Each enables us to do more than our bodies could do on their own. Similarly, the medium of language extends our thoughts from within our mind out to others. Indeed, since our thoughts are the result of our individual sensory experience, speech is an “outering” of our senses – we could consider it as a form of reversing senses – whereas usually our senses bring the world into our minds, speech takes our sensorially-shaped minds out to the world.

But McLuhan always thought of a medium in the sense of a growing medium, like the fertile potting soil into which a seed is planted, or the agar in a Petri dish. In other words, a medium – this extension of our body or senses or mind – is anything from which a change emerges. And since some sort of change emerges from everything we conceive or create, all of our inventions, innovations, ideas and ideals are McLuhan media.

Thus we have the meaning of “the medium is the message:” We can know the nature and characteristics of anything we conceive or create (medium) by virtue of the changes – often unnoticed and non-obvious
changes – that they effect (message.) McLuhan warns us that we are often distracted by the content of a medium (which, in almost all cases, is another distinct medium in itself.) He writes, “it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.” (p. 9) And it is the character of the medium that is its potency or effect – its message. In other words, “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

Why is this understanding of “the medium is the message” particularly useful? We tend to notice changes – even slight changes (that unfortunately we often tend to discount in significance.) “The medium is the
message” tells us that noticing change in our societal or cultural ground conditions indicates the presence of a new message, that is, the effects of a new medium. With this early warning, we can set out to characterize and identify the new medium before it becomes obvious to everyone – a process that often takes years or even decades. And if we discover that the new medium brings along effects that might be detrimental to our society or culture, we have the opportunity to influence the development and evolution of
the new innovation before the effects becomes pervasive. As McLuhan reminds us, “Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.” (p.199)

Reference
McLuhan, Marshall. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill.
Citation:
Federman, M. (2004). What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message? Retrieved <DATE> from
http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/MeaningTheMediumistheMessage.pdf

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The Medium is the Message — The Internet

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A closer look at Marshall McLuhan and his iconic phrase.

McLuhan’s Theory

McLuhan uses the term “message” to signify content and character. The content of the medium is a message that can be easily grasped and the character of the medium is another message which can be easily overlooked. McLuhan says “Indeed, it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium”. For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled “the scale and form of human association and action”.[5] Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed “the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure”. Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from “lineal connections” to “configurations.”[6] Extending the argument for understanding the medium as the message itself, he proposed that the “content of any medium is always another medium”[7] – thus, speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print, and print itself is the content of the telegraph.                 This Canadian work is in the public domain in Canada (the picture of McLuhan)

McLuhan frequently punned on the word “message”, changing it to “mass age”, “mess age” and “massage”. A later book, The Medium Is the Massage was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title, which is said to have been a printing error.[8]

McLuhan understood “medium” as a medium of communication in the broadest sense. In Understanding Media he wrote: “The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name.”[11] The light bulb is a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”: a light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence”.[7] Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself (the content), and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner.[12]

In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the “content” of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.[11] This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As society’s values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of.[12]

On the subject of art history, McLuhan interpreted Cubism as announcing clearly that the medium is the message. For him, Cubist art required “instant sensory awareness of the whole” rather than perspective alone. In other words, with Cubism one could not ask what the artwork was about (content), but rather consider it in its entirety.[13] Many of the conceptions presented in this work are expansions, popularizations and applications of ideas initially conceived by Walter Benjamin and the dialog between his texts and other thinkers in the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s.[14]

Applications

Television

See also: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death worried that McLuhan’s theory, if true, meant that television was uniquely destructive to the public conversation in America, with style trumping substance.[15]

Internet

Some modern journalists and academics have pointed to algorithms, social media and the internet as great examples of McLuhan’s theory.[16][17][18][15]

See also

Philosophy of technology
Post-structuralism
Hyperreality
Technology and society

References

McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. ISBN 81-14-67535-7.
Beynon-Davies, Paul (2011). “Communication: The medium is not the message”. Significance. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 58–76. doi:10.1057/9780230295025_4. ISBN 978-1-349-32470-5.
Originally published in 1964 by Mentor, New York; reissued 1994, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts with an introduction by Lewis Lapham
Euchner, Jim (2016-08-26). “The Medium is the Message”. Research-Technology Management. 59 (5). Informa UK Limited: 9–11. doi:10.1080/08956308.2016.1209068. ISSN 0895-6308.
McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 9.
McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 12.
McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 8.
“Commonly Asked Questions about McLuhan – The Estate of Marshall McLuhan”. marshallmcluhan.com. Retrieved 2019-12-04.
McLuhan, Marshall (1967-03-19). “McLuhan: Now The Medium Is The Massage”. New York Times. Retrieved 2018-09-04.
Federman, Mark (July 23, 2004). “What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?”. individual.utoronto.ca. Retrieved 2019-03-23.
McLuhan, Marshall (1964) Understanding Media, Routledge, London
Federman, M. (2004, July 23). “What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message?”. Retrieved October 9, 2008.
McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 13.
Russell, Catherine (2004). “New Media and Film History: Walter Benjamin and the Awakening of Cinema”. Cinema Journal. 43 (3): 81–85. doi:10.1353/cj.2004.0024. ISSN 0009-7101. JSTOR 3661111.
Kang, Jay Caspian (2024-03-08). “Arguing Ourselves to Death”. The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2024-09-17.
“The algorithm will be the message”. Nieman Lab. Retrieved 2024-09-17.
“Marshall McLuhan: The medium is the message”. Al Jazeera. October 31, 2019. Retrieved 2024-09-17.
“Social media — why the medium is still the message”. Deseret News. 2013-11-20. Retrieved 2024-09-17.
External links
MediaTropes eJournal A scholarly journal, Vol. 1, Marshall McLuhan’s “Medium is the Message”: Information Literacy in a Multimedia Age
Guardian Big Ideas podcast by Benjamen Walker
Canadian Heritage Minute video Dramatization of McLuhan discovering the idea in a Heritage Minute

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